-Frontline.in The increase in the budgetary allocation for the MGNREGA is only marginal. The scheme helped lower the poverty level by 32 per cent between 2004-05 and 2011-12, but government support for it has been declining steadily. In the beginning, economists belonging to the Right and the Left were of the view that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) was merely a populist measure. While the former believed...

-Livemint.com The government relies on for-profit big business to deliver public goods despite their inability to deliver Can we listen to the budget as an annual public statement by the government of its economic and social philosophy and intent? The centre abandoned five-year plans that earlier laid down a road map of where government policies are headed. The budget, then, is an important reality check of whether the government is literally...

-Livemint.com Manufacturing is the biggest positive contributor to aggregate employment elasticity in the country, a fact which might appear counter-intuitive to many New Delhi: One of the biggest criticisms of India’s high growth trajectory this century has been its failure to generate Jobs. Economists attribute this phenomenon to a decline in employment elasticity of output, which means that the same amount of output growth creates fewer Jobs than it used to....

-MilliGazette.com New Delhi: In a sensational blunt statement, Modi Government’s AYUSH Ministry has said that as per government policy, it does not recruit Muslims. This unbelievable truth came out in a reply to an RTI (Right to Information) query about the Muslim teachers and trainers recruited by the AYUSH  Ministry for foreign assignments during the World Yoga Day last year. AYUSH is the abbreviation of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha...

-The Telegraph Chennai: Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) has agreed to compensate nearly 600 former employees who were exposed to toxic mercury in a thermometer factory that had been relocated from New York to Tamil Nadu by another investor in 1984 following environmental concerns in the US. The thermometer factory is located at Kodaikanal, around 430km from here. The plant was shut down in 2011 after Greenpeace activists found mercury waste in the...